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Journalism about pwnage

Noob Rental Review – Prototype 2

Welcome to my first PS3 rental review! 🙂 I’m usually an RPG kinda gamer, but I plan on diving into everything, whatever’s new, for my reviews. I’ll be doing one every weekend, giving you my best feedback. There is nothing worse (game wise) than reaching into my emaciated little wallet, dishing out $60 and then regretting it for the rest of my life as the game collects dust or gets turned into a coaster.

Here’s my rating system (because I figured it would sound all official that way):

Epic – I am on my way to buy it RIGHT NOW. Do not get between me and my game, and nobody gets hurt… We needs our fix… Our preciouses…

Cash-Worthy – Good stuff. Definitely worthy of a place of honor on my shelf. It will never end up as a coaster.

Rental – It’s alright. I may buy it if it’s on sale someday. I suggest renting it first, because you may love it or you may hate it. It could go either way.

Coaster – My wallet is crying, and I’m running a google search in another window on making wind chimes out of discs.

So, without further ado, here is my Prototype 2 review:

First of all, I have to admit that I never played the first Prototype.

I know. I have realized the error of my ways. Epic fail on my part.

I didn’t think it would really be my thing, story wise or gameplay wise. But I have to admit, I have been converted, and I plan on going back and playing the first one to get the whole story.

Luckily for me, they waste no time in filling you in on the main details with the opening. There’s even a “recap” option on the start screen. I won’t get too much into story specifics to avoid spoilers, but I will say that they’ve done a really good job of keeping me interested. This time around you play as a character named Heller, who gets his life torn apart by the plague. All he’s left with is vengeance, right from the start. He wants to find the people who are responsible and crush them.

I can get behind that. 🙂 With the way the story arc is going, I’m really looking forward to some serious Heller retribution.

Another thing I like about Prototype 2 is its gameplay versatility. I can either go in and rain some doom upon everyone, kinda like this but with more explosions and flying body parts:

Subtlety is not one of my strengths, so this is my usual playing style.

Or I can go in all stealthy-like, which is surprisingly fun in this game:

Heller is fun to play. The attacks are quick and smooth, easy to execute. I kind of love that you can just randomly munch on people like they’re potato chips to regain health. And they even managed to make that feature fit with the storyline. Very cool. You level up slowly though, so spend upgrades wisely. I chose to max out my regeneration and spend points on skills that make me harder to kill – mainly because of my love of doom-raining sprees.

There is a potential issue with mission repetition later in the game. So far I’m traveling all over the city, chowing down on scientists, plague mutants, and Blackwatch peeps to absorb info – and presumably because they’re tasty. I don’t really see that getting old for me though.

The controls and cameras are user-friendly, for the most part. Movement and travel is really smooth, and you can get from one end of the map to the other fairly quickly. The only time I have a problem is when I’m trying to chew on somebody and accidentally grab the car beside them by mistake.

Note: Cars are not eatable.

And you also can’t stealth-eat a car, which means you get noticed. Which means strike teams. Strike teams are bad.

One complaint I have is saving. *ugh* This irks me. Not enough to ruin the game or anything. But it is annoying. The game saves automatically, and also has a save feature in the menu. However, in my opinion, I feel like they should have just left that option out of the menu, because they don’t let you start from where you saved. They take you back to your last autosave checkpoint. This wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t have to work. Or sleep. Or leave the house period. I had to stop in the middle of one mission three times, and each time I came back I had to redo the whole beginning of the mission. By the time I finally finished it I could get into the enemy compound and stealth-kill everyone outside in under a minute. [Edit: I take some of my annoyance back – this appears to only be a problem during missions, lol. I suppose I should stop starting missions at bad times. 🙂 ]

Over all, this game is pretty awesome, has good replay value (I want to try this on nightmare difficulty), and I will be buying it. I definitely suggest giving it a try.